Thursday, July 26, 2012

9 months

Length: 29.5 inches - 90th percentile. He's also in the 95th percentile for head size.

What he's eating: Lots of solids! We're steadily moving toward a life where PB can just eat what we're eating, with minor modifications - no cow's milk, honey or nut things yet, and limited salt. But each day the solids are getting easier, it seems. We just try to give him a variety of colors and generally some protein, some carbs and lots of fruit and veggies.

Acidic things bother him a little bit - I was feeding him a bunch of pineapple (and eating some myself) and then PB was spitting up a lot, all the sudden. DH connected those dots.This makes sense - I haven't been drinking orange juice because he spit up all the time when he was new if I'd have citrus. So I think we need to go easy on the pineapple, too.

He is also trying to figure out how to drink from a cup - especially with his stacking cups in the bath tub. I'm pretty sure he's chugged some bath water at this point. Parenting win. I just picked up a couple of straw cups (rated for kids 12-months-plus, but he'll be there soon enough) so we'll see if he likes those.

We're still nursing, too. He either nurses or has a bottle 5-6 times in 24 hours.

Physical skills: Lightning-fast crawling, cruising along furniture and baby gates, and wiggling impossibly during diaper changes. This kid is on the move. His pincer grasp is very fine - he can easily pluck an individual pea off the high chair tray and put it in his mouth - and he enjoys taking apart his big Mega Blocks if we put them together.

Also, we'd been in the new house for less than 2 weeks when he figured out how to climb stairs and proceeded to climb a whole flight (with DH spotting him) on June 26. DH bought one of those baby corrals the next day.

Teeth: SIX. Four of his top teeth came in over the past month. Poor dude had a couple of rough nights, and I dosed him with Tylenol on two different midnights when he was clearly suffering. He's such a trooper... I hate how painful it is for him. We seem to be in a teething pause now, for which I'm thankful.

Favorite toys: This is typical: I was trying to tidy up the baby corral area in the family room, and we had these stackable plastic drawers that I've had since college that have moved with me many times. They didn't have an assigned place, so I put all the random toys in one drawer and the Mega Blocks in another and stacked them up in the corral area one night. The next morning, PB behaved like it was a Christmas Miracle in July, and proceeded to dismantle the entire set of drawers, including flipping over the Mega Blocks drawer so the blocks went everywhere. This is now one of his daily projects: we put everything together overnight, and he takes it all apart in the morning. I feel like the Drawer Fairy or something.

Verbal skills: He's babbling all the time, still a lot of "mamamama", and more of a variety of vowel sounds.

Social skills: He has learned how to clap, and if one of us says "yay!" and claps our hands, he busts out a huge smile and claps, too. He also claps when I come home from work in the evening sometimes. This makes my heart explode.

We visited our good friends Bro and the Speaker and their little guy, who is 5 months old, last week. PB had a lot of interaction with the other baby and Bro's three pets: two cats and a dog. DH and I are brokenhearted cat people, of course, so we were anxious to see how PB did with the cats. Happily, he LOVED them. When he saw Layla, a tuxedo kitty, he immediately started laughing with excitement. I almost had to go elsewhere and cry because dear departed Corina was a tuxedo kitty and now I'm convinced he would have loved her as much as we did.

Bro's pets are really calm and used to a baby - though not one who's quite as mobile as ours - so they were good for him to be around. Their big sweet golden retriever gave him lots of licks on the face, which startled him sometimes, but he seemed to like it.

Overall, he's still pretty good with strangers. If we're in a store or something and a random person walks up and talks to him, he's generally pretty quick to smile.

Sleep: A couple of weeks ago I decided to try "dream feeding" - nursing him when he's basically still asleep around 10:30 or so before I go to bed. And since I've been doing that (with the exception of a couple of rough teething nights) he's been sleeping through the night: 7:30ish pm to 6:30ish am. Naps are getting fairly consistent: a morning nap of about an hour around 9:30, and a longer afternoon nap in the 1:30-2:00 range.

I may regret typing it in public, but I'm less tired these days. I am also, overall, less stressed at the moment, which I think helps with everything. A few weeks ago I had a low-grade fever for several days, and it wasn't until day 3 that I actually realized I was sick and not just exhausted. This kind of scared me. DH and I have been working on some medium-term plans to make sure we don't let ourselves get that overstressed (um, starting with not moving twice and having a baby all within 10 months - that's a poor plan).

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Living in Chicago with Domestic Hercules, my husband, as we figure out life after grad school. Writing about my adventures, fun news tidbits, and other items I may have considered posting to social networking sites.